Many mechanical and extruded metal parts are die formed in die presses to introduce small changes in angle and direction commonly called joggles. In order to introduce the joggles into relatively thin metallic parts, dies are manufactured that will produce the desired joggle in the metallic part when used with an appropriate die press. These slight angle changes are particularly common in aircraft fuselages. The joggles are required to tie in the aircraft skin and the sheet metal parts or extrusions in a manner that produces a level surface. Simply stated, steps are required in cetain metal elements to facilitate crossovers and attachment points.
The tooling required to meet all aircraft requirements of this nature is often very expensive. This is because typical aircraft production often requires that a relatively small number of parts be manufactured at any one time.
Conventionally, dies are machined to fit the requirements of introducing joggles into the required parts. Conventional dies are manufactured from hard tool steel or similar hard material that is expensive to machine. The machining cost for the large number of dies required to satisfy the aircraft requirements can be far more costly than the actual manufacture of the aircraft parts themselves. In addition, the dies, or tooling, must be stored, because of their great aggregate cost, for any future possible production runs. This has resulted in large amounts of tooling being stored for long periods of time at relatively high cost.
It is an object of this invention therefore to provide a method and apparatus for die forming metal sheets and extrusions which greatly reduces tooling costs.
It is a further object of this invention to eliminate the need for storage of large numbers of unique dies.